Helping families discover, hire, and manage in-home caregivers
Clara is a marketplace that connects local home care aides with families seeking care, and solves employment and care management problems that existing solutions don't. Government regulation requires all home care aides to be classified as W-2 employees. Clara's senior-care specific payroll and compliance platform makes legally employing independent care workers as easy as contracting with an agency, with automated employer registration, payroll, taxes, and insurance. Compounding the challenges of caring for a loved one, many family members are no longer living near their aging relative. Clara's suite of AI-enabled care management tools take advantage of the proliferation of internet-connected in-home devices, marrying their data with on-the-ground input from caregivers to provide intelligent insights and updates, keeping families and healthcare providers in the loop, and ensuring care quality. Clara was founded by two former Uber colleagues who have experienced the challenges of managing care for a loved one personally, and are inspired by the opportunity to apply their tech backgrounds to solving the most widespread and impactful issues in the >$120B in-home care industry. Clara is a pre-seed stage company, backed by Virtue, a leading early-stage Health VC (https://www.virtuevc.com/). Their marketplace is currently live in the SF Bay Area, while their consumer-facing senior-care payroll and tax management solution is live nationwide.
Active Founders
Company Launches
TL;DR
Clara is a home care marketplace that makes it easy for families to find and employ their ideal caregiver.
Our platform uses AI to match customers with the best possible caregiver and automates compliance with built-in payroll, tax, and insurance support, all for 15-25% less than a home care agency.
Clara is currently live in the SF Bay Area. Sign up today at clarahomecare.com
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The Problems with Home Care
🧑⚕️🌊 More Americans than ever before need care
- Silver Tsunami - 11,000 Americans will turn 65 every day from now through 2027. 69% of those will require long-term care, for an average of 3 years (HHS). ~88% of them would prefer to age at home rather than in a facility (AARP)
- Care work is the fastest growing profession in the U.S., projected to add >1M jobs by 2028. Job growth in this sector is greater than the second and third U.S. occupations with the most job growth combined (BLS)
💸 Care costs for families are high and not correlated with quality
- Non-medical care is not covered by Medicare or standard health insurance plans
- The average out-of-pocket cost of a home health aide in SF today is $102,960/year
- Most care is delivered by home care agencies that take 30-50% margin, taking advantage of unsophisticated consumers who rely on referrals from overworked case managers/social workers
- Care recipients often suffer from high caregiver turnover, with families reporting >100 caregivers cycling through their homes
- Fed up with agencies, many families pay independent care workers cash under the table, opening them up to costly tax penalties and significant personal liability
😞 Caregivers are underpaid and disempowered
- Avg. hourly wages for care workers total just $14-$16/hr. 45% of care workers live at, or near poverty.
- Industry-wide turnover is ~80% due to poor pay, difficult working conditions, and unpredictable schedules
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The Solution
Clara helps families legally hire and manage caregivers, without the use of agency
Our platform:
- 👫 Uses AI to match families with local Home Health Aides (HHAs), Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), or experienced companion caregivers, all thoroughly vetted and background-checked
- 📝 Makes 100% legal, on-the-books employment frictionless by automating payroll, taxes, and insurance
- 📱Helps caregivers deliver the best care possible, while keeping families in the loop with gen-AI care management features
Our approach:
- Improves care quality, consistency, and transparency for care recipients and their families
- Increases take-home pay and stability for caregivers, while providing access to key benefits like unemployment insurance and social security
That’s why our customers call us “refreshing”, and our caregivers call us “too good to be true”
Jon and Lydia, a Clara care recipient
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Our Team
Jon and Ian met as Product and Engineering management counterparts at Uber, where they launched and grew Uber Direct, a new line of business, from $0 —> ~$1B in revenue.
When Jon and his family faced the frustrations of finding and managing care for his father, he reached out to Ian to collaborate on a new approach. Leveraging their combined 20 years of experience building lovable consumer and marketplace tech products, they reimagined home care in America.
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🙏 How you can help us
- If you know any fantastic caregivers looking for better home care employment opportunities, kindly refer them to us at https://www.clarahomecare.com/clara-for-caregivers
- We’d also love introductions to Social Services Directors, Case Managers, or other professionals with similar roles at post-acute rehab/skilled nursing facilities in the SF Bay Area. We’re building tooling to make their lives easier and would love early partners
- Show us some ❤️ by liking/following us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
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💝 How we can help you
To celebrate our launch we’re offering 50% off our service fee for the YC community. If you (or someone you know) is looking for a caregiver, or wants to explore new caregiving options for an aging loved one in the Bay Area, send them our way! Just have them complete our intake form at clarahomecare.com, and send an email to yc@clarahomecare.com. Mention this offer and we’ll take 50% off their first 6 months.